Sender Spike
2 min readSep 10, 2020

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I'm glad to see that we are on the same page. Let me add a few clarifications.

First, when I talk about recreation and fun around a campfire, I don't mean the carefree way of modern civilization. Our advanced technology makes us really complacent and inattentive. That was a luxury the ancient folks could not afford — one bad step could result in death or serious injury. Thus, I’d bet that their whole lives were performed with utmost attention to all activities (even the festive ones), something that may definitely appear as ritualistic to us, modern people. Additionally, being watchful is actually the very purpose of ritual in religious/mystical context (i.e. merely performing the various rituals for their own sake while hoping for some “mystical” outcome has no actual pragmatic value despite what the majority of believers thinks).

Second, I’m aware that “the tribal folks testified that their dreams and spirit journeys were real” and I don’t think it was a “misinterpretation by anthropologists”. I consider my dreams real and a source of valuable information, too, yet I don’t conflate them with what we causally call reality. Thus, I think that for our ancestors dream world and waking world had the same weight and significance and both were parts of the same reality (quite obviously). That is something that may be hard to imagine for a modern human, because, for whatever reason, our modern society treats the dream world as less real (and thus less significant). Yet, I’m firmly convinced that the tribal folks, despite treating them equally, didn’t confuse the two worlds (though, looking at e.g. Aboriginal Dreaming it’s really hard to draw a distinct line).

So, maybe calling the ancients highly metaphorical really makes sense only within our modern discourse where we discuss everything in relation to reality meaning waking state. By extension, modern Christians, because they live in the same era and context, inevitably relate their dogmas, dreams, and visions to waking state, too, thus they are prone to lose the distinction between the two worlds and expect literal manifestations from the dream world to appear in the waking world. And that is especially true for those who merely parrot what they heard from the pulpit, but makes a mess even of those who fail to interpret their exalted experiences within proper context as the modern Christianity in general does not provide one. Alas, it is a problem that plagues all institutionalized religions since their inception.

Then again, the more I think about it the more it seems to me that the twisting of knowledge into unfounded fantasies is as old as human propensity for symbolic thinking itself. I guess, it has more to do with individual intelligence, emotional maturity, and actual experiences (or lack thereof) than with religion, ritual, or entheogens. Otherwise it’s hard to explain idiocies such as male/female circumcision or animal/human offerings, just to name a few (though, I admit I have no idea how old are those practices). Hm, …

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